Bazaar, a distributed version control system used by the northxsouth developers network, just became a GNU project. The news was announced in February by Martin Pool, manager of Bazaar development at Canonical.

Distributed VCS, for those who are new to the concept, offers a long list of resources for programmers, such as: the possibility to work offline without the need of a central VCS repository; makes it easy to create new branches; merging is easier for the release manager and more.

The San Francisco Community Colo celebrated its one year anniversary of the opening of their cabinets at their facility at 6th and Brannan in downtown San Francisco. Since there are also volunteers who do remote sysadmin work for SFCCP in Sao Paulo, Brazil, they held a simultaneous party there and the two parties were linked in all kinds of ways… audio, video, IRC. The whole event was super-geeky. And it was a lot of fun. So, there is a full debriefing of the party and there are pictures on the SFCCP Flickr account.

The northxsouth.com mailing lists have been migrated to our new server and the new lists are up and running.

• Announce List - if you are a client, developer, interested party, from the media or just a general fan, you should be on our low-volume announcement mailing list.
• Developers Network - If you are part of the northxsouth developers network, you should be on this list so you can receive new project announcements. Optionally, you can also be on the general developers discussion list to talk with fellow developers about anything.

More and more mainstream software engineering institutions are picking up on what we’ve been saying for the past 2 years: South America is a hot-bed of software engineering and software business innovation. Dr Dobbs Journal, which has been publishing its magazine for programmers since 1976, has just published an in-depth look at the Latin American phenomenon.

This article takes particular note of Brazil, which is where northxsouth has its Latin American headquarters. 2008, as we’ve predicted, should be the year when this trend really takes off, and northxsouth is positioned to be at the forefront of collaboration with Latin America for web-based software development, having done open source development work with Latin America for over 8 years.

As an exporter of software, South America generally is a player and is growing at a double-digit rate. Outsourcing relationships with South American companies are already big business, and often a smart decision for North American companies. IDC identifies Latin America, which also includes Mexico and Central America, as having a pool of software developers essentially equal to Central and Eastern Europe, a region that many consider a hotbed of software talent.

This one is just too good to ignore. We at northxsouth have speculated for a while that 2008 will be the year that near-shoring really takes off in Latin America and we plan to be right there, helping it happen.

If you still need convincing, try this on for size — India-based outsourcing companies are now out-sourcing their work to Latin America! India’s Tata Consultancy Service has begun opening offices in Uruguay — and has incredibly expanded to 5,500 employees throughout Latin America. The same reasons we’ve been talking about are cited: better time zone difference, Latin American business culture is more similar to US business culture than India, etc. You might have to register to read the whole article but it is worth the read.